“The staggering financial losses and the lack of real, tangible progress at mitigating fraud highlights the importance of the industry’s Trustworthy Accountability Group in fighting this war.

“It also underscores the need for the entire marketing ecosystem to manage their media investments with far greater discipline and control against a backdrop of increasingly sophisticated fraudsters.”

The authors of the paper, titled Bot Baseline: Fraud in Digital Advertising, outlined a number of recommendations for the online advertising industry.

This includes developing a better understanding of the programmatic supply chain; investing in third-party monitoring; and requesting transparency for sourced traffic.

“The study highlights the challenges faced by the advertising ecosystem as defenders, and the many techniques that a sophisticated, persistent adversary can exploit within the online advertising industry,” added Michael Tiffany, CEO of White Ops.

“Although our study definitively demonstrates areas of improvement … we are still facing an uphill battle to achieve broad acceptance of the need for deeper focus on the fraud problem, and ultimately to reverse these financial trends.”